Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Analysing The Satyam Affair: Pointers to Business Fraud in India

  19 February 2009, by Arun Kumar

  Business fraud is nothing new in India. Businessmen are known to go to great lengths to make money through legitimate and illegitimate ways. Clever accountants and lawyers are employed to devise ways to generate higher profits for the businessmen.
  The Satyam affair stunned everyone when its supposedly ‘honest’ chairperson admitted to committing fraud over the last several years. Apparently, Satyam has been defrauded of Rs 7000 crores but the final tally could be larger. The loss to (…)

• Desperate Capitalism, Disparaged State, and Doctored Democracy

  19 February 2009, by Dev N Pathak

  Satyam! Shivam! Sundaram??
  The nation wakes up to the news of the day on January 16, 2009: The Prime Minister addresses the captains of industry, sending a message to India Inc. at the Trident Oberoi hotel in Mumbai. The content: ‘Everything is back to normal.. India is safe.. please come back.’ It is a day after the front page of almost every newspaper splashed the silent waters. Reports could not resist the analytical temptation and passed suspicion-laced comments. The (…)

• Cuba Fifty

  19 February 2009, by Badri Raina

  Dear Fidel,
  The Trotskyites say
  That the revolution you made
  Was not a proper one;
  It was not even socialist.
  It was not led by the proletariat,
  But by petty-bourgeois, nationalist elements.
  They remind us that on your
  First trip to the United States
  After the victory over Batista,
  You openly said you are not a communist.
  They remind us how
  You ganged up with the Stalinist PSP,
  Which in turn had lent support
  To Batista in the 1940s.
  They even say that at Havana (…)

• Press Freedom in Nepal

  19 February 2009

  From February 5 to 8, 2009 an International Media Mission was in Nepal for a rapid assessment of the serious situation with regard to press freedom in that country. The mission members were: Toby Mendel and Sejal Parmar (Article 19), Sukumar Muralidharan (International Federation of Journalists), Thomas Hughes (International Media Support), Binod Dhungel (Reporter without Borders), Serena Pepino and Iskra Panevska (UNESCO), Mark Bench (World Press Freedom Committee), Sumit Chakravartty (…)

• Nothing Left to Say

  19 February 2009, by Spencer A. Leonard

  [( A few days ago the Mainstream editor received the following article with a letter from the author that read:
  “I’m a historian of India from the University of Chicago where I’m presently completing my dissertation under the supervision of Drs Dipesh Chakrabarty, Muzaffar Alam, Moishe Postone, and Ralph Austen. Whenever I come to India to do research I read Mainstream regularly. I have written a longish piece criticising the Left-wing media discourse surrounding the Mumbai attacks as (…)

• In the Wake of the Mumbai Terror

  19 February 2009, by Arup Kumar Sen

  The nerve-wracking hours of terror in Mumbai are over. Now it is the time of reckoning. Sensible observers remind us that our experience of terror attacks has a long history. The eminent Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh, observes in this connection that the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 led to riots, which took the lives of some two thousand Sikhs. In her recent discourse on Azadi, Arundhati Roy reminded us “of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been (…)

• And Then They Came For Me

  19 February 2009, by Lasantha Wickrematunga

  Media
  Lasantha Wickrematunga was the founder editor of the Sri Lankan publication, The Sunday Leader. He was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Colombo on January 8, 2009. He had a strange premonition of his impending assassination and wrote the following editorial before his murder. It is a brilliant testimony to his abiding faith in the noble profession of journalism as well as his exemplary courage. He fearlessly exposed corruption and human rights abuses while supporting the (…)

• Peace Prospects in Sri Lanka

  19 February 2009, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The inadvertent remarks by our High Commissioner in Colombo about payment of a good sum to the LTTE leader has not only come as a total surprise but has led to repercussions which are turning out to be highly embarrassing for the government.
  High Commissioner Dixit is not only a senior member of our Foreign Service but is known for his maturity and competence. He has handled in the past such difficult assignments as Bangladesh immediately after its liberation in 1972 when he was the (…)

• Exposing the Fallacy in the Current Policy of Economic Development

  19 February 2009, by B P Mathur

  Review Article
  Alternative Economic Survey, India 2007-08: Decline of the Developmental State by Alternative Survey Group; Daanish Books, Delhi; 2008, pp. 319, Rs 295.
  The global economy is today facing unprece-dented crisis with falling production and job losses. To prevent economic collapse the governments of the US and other developed countries are giving massive bail-out packages to their failing banks and financial institutions and virtually nationalising them. There has been a (…)

• Pitfalls in the Nayachar Chemical Hub

  19 February 2009, by Subrata Sinha

  A news item was published in the newspapers on February 4 that the Government of India has virtually cleared the Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray Chemical Hub at Nayachar island, just offshore of the original location at Nandigram in the Haldia zone in West Bengal. However, the final green signal awaits vetting by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA).
  The proposed chemical hub envisages a public plus private sector investment of the order of Rs 100,000 crores. The news (…)